But, recent research suggests that women are considered better coders – but only if they hide their gender.

Here are five female coders who have made significant contributions to the field – and indeed helped change the world.

Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton was director of software engineering for the project that wrote the code for the Apollo Guide Computer (AGC). Developed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo 11 mission, the programmers literally had to start from scratch.

Image: MIT

The team wrote the code for the first portable computer. Their work made the first moon landing possible and spawned a new industry. Hamilton became an expert in systems programming, but as she explained to Wired:

“When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it.”

She believed opening up computing to business and non-scientific applications required simpler programming languages. Established wisdom was that computers didn’t understand English and it took years before her ideas were accepted.

But through her perseverance she developed a means of programming using words rather than numbers – most notably the COBOL (Common Business Orientated Language) language.

A group of six young women who developed the first all-electronic, programmable computer as part of the US Army’s World War Two effort. When the ENIAC was first unveiled, the women received no recognition.

Ada Lovelace

The daughter of British poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was a Victorian mathematician. She worked with Charles Babbage on his calculating machines – he called her the “enchantress of numbers”.

At the time few women studied science or maths, and she is widely considered the founder of computing science and the world’s first computer programmer.

Image: The Atlantic / Wikimedia Commons

The British Science Museum argues she foreshadowed modern computing by a century, by understanding the ability of the calculating machines to “manipulate symbols rather than just numbers”.

Clarke (later Murray) worked on the project to break the German Enigma ciphers. A Cambridge mathematician, she and the rest of the team built some of the earliest computers, known as bombes. These were used to decipher German codes. It is frequently suggested that their efforts shortened the war by up to two years.

A British Turing Bombe machine is seen functioning in Bletchley Park Museum

Image: REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico

Clarke was originally employed as a clerical worker at Bletchley. Once she was promoted to work on code-breaking, she had to be officially designated as linguist, because there were no procedures in place for a senior female cryptanalyst.

She is reported to have taken great pleasure in completing forms with “Grade: Linguist, Languages: none.”